If you’re not using video in your online marketing strategy, you’re leaving a huge element of exposure and driving traffic back to your website out of the equation. I’m not so sure you can even say you have an online marketing strategy in 2012 if it does not include video. If you do have an internet marketing strategy and it DOES NOT include video…I think as you’re reading this right now you’ll start noting that you need to have one and it needs to be done as soon as possible.
If you do have video on your website you need to make sure they are all uploaded to YouTube as it’s the main search engine for video. The traffic on YouTube is enormous and the possibility for exposure (views) is tremendous.
So, how do you rank your video well on YouTube and try to get the most views possible?
INCLUDE KEYWORDS IN YOUR TITLE AND DESCRIPTIONS.
As in your website pages, keywords play a crucial role in video as well. Make sure you are creating titles and descriptions for your videos just as you would on your pages to optimize them for the search engines. Remember, with video, you are essentially doing the same thing! Creating good and relevant title and description tags so they rank well not only on YouTube but also in the search engine (GOOGLE) as universal search has rolled in for a few years now.
Video has exploded onto the scene about 2 years ago or so. This is when websites, especially ecommerce websites, saw an incredible value and consumer engagement when video was posted on their websites, especially videos to showcase products, etc.
Are you using video on your ecommerce website? If not, why? Sure, video may seem like a daunting task to create, place on your website, etc. The truth is that these days, videos are quite simple to make. There are also companies and individuals who can create videos for very affordable prices today.
There are plenty ways you can use video which can enhance your conversions but also the branding of your ecommerce website.
1. CATEGORY PAGES: If you have videos on your category pages, this can increase conversions as video not only looks more professional, but if your video is ‘good’ content, it will help make the sell for you. Videos on product pages should be informational and should try to contain angle images of the products and close ups if possible.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that after Google, the second most popular engine for searching is YouTube. This site has the most number of queries aside from Google. Thus, coming up in the YouTube search results would mean that your videos will have to be optimized in order to have a fighting chance against the millions of videos all also fighting for a ranking in YouTube.
First Thing First
Before thinking about how your video can achieve a ranking in YouTube, you will have to create an account and sign in to the site first. Once you have successfully registered, then you will have your own channel and can start uploading your videos. Having only a channel without uploading any videos will not get you anywhere near a YouTube ranking. Always remember that a channel without videos will mean zero ranking.
Go Viral
A viral video is defined as a video that became popular through Internet sharing. This sharing could be done through video-sharing sites, email, or social media. These videos can have different types of content, however most viral videos are either humorous, eyewitness events or amateur videos. Basically, a video becomes “viral” when its content catches and holds the attention of a huge number of viewers in a very short period of time.
Are you a search marketing? Does your business focus on pay-per-click? Display advertising? If so, you’ve probably heard of YouTube ads by now. If you haven’t, you now have a great new marketing channel to really promote your products and business.
There are two ways you can use YouTube as a super marketing tool to drive traffic and sales to your website. Since YouTube is a Google owned property, the Google Adwords platform allows you to target YouTube for text ads! The new platform to promote videos is actually a YouTube made platform, YouTube Ads.
If you’re an internet retailer and still not thinking about online video or some strategy to start think about how you’ll get video on your website, you may be behind the curve. Don’t just think that because your top competitors don’t have video that you’re OK. If anything, that should be more of a motivating factor to get on the ball with online video. If you wait for your competitor to do things and then you follow, you’ll never be a leader in your niche.
Online video can really help boost conversions as consumers may see a video as a great selling point and helpful as well as helping boost traffic from search engines and video engines. We’ve talked about this many times before, just look at how Zappos started to place video reviews of their products and now they are all indexed by Google which probably creates an incredible amount of traffic for them.
Lou Barton, the president of web branding and online video service provider Lou Bartone outlined four steps to creating online for ecommerce:
It’s no secret that video can prove to be a winning strategy in ecommerce web design and marketing. Video in ecommerce seems very much to be trending up and more and more internet retailers understand how it can impact conversions, thus starting to implement video into their ecommerce websites.
It may be soon enough when having video will actually become best practice for ecommerce websites, but for now, it’s just an additional great feature that you can offer to your customers as part of your winning web design. Also, did I mention why you should add video to your website for search engine optimization reasons?
Google, as mentioned before in our blog, maybe more than once, loves video as well in their natural search listings. As part of its universal search algorithm, it indexes videos just like it indexes images. The best example I can think of which is a website really doing video the right way to drive traffic to their website is Zappos. The company has thousands of indexed videos in Googles organic search which drives countless amount of traffic as well as may be converting very well, may be better than a natural or paid search listing.
We all know how video is evolving on the web and how consumers are engaging with video online. Youtube is one of the most visited website in the world (top 5) and has had a great impact on internet retailers because of the nature of how Google is also using video in its search index in the organic rankings.
The latest case study reported by InternetRetailer.com gives us a good insight on the impact of video on your product pages and how consumers engage with video. eParty Unlimited, a website that sells party supplies and other products is reporting that consumers who watch a video have a 43% higher conversion rate than other shoppers.
What a product video can do is:
1. Give more credibility to your website.
2. Provide consumers with more product information
3. Better showcase of the actual product
InternetRetailer.com reports, “…That’s important, says Weng, because Google rewards sites that post original video content by boosting their rankings. “It’s very powerful,” he says. “Within less than a week all of our videos were indexed by Google, getting us to the first pages of organic search results for many popular search queries.”
If you keep up with the world of online marketing and follow our blog, you know and understand how big online video is to get exposure and how it should definitely be in your online marketing strategy. The amount of videos being watched online per second is unbelievable and if you’re not getting any exposure with video, it’s time you start making online video part of your ecommerce online marketing strategy.
As the video space gets more competitive as online retailers and many online marketers realize the potential of video for search engine optimization, different metrics will start going into the search engines algorithm. SEOMoz.org had a great whiteboard Friday post on video SEO basics and what will impact video rankings.
Are you doing any online video marketing for your e-commerce website? Video has been a very hot topics for online marketers and e-commerce merchants as it is helping with driving traffic and increasing sales conversions.
Let’s look at some of the basic video SEO strategies and other metrics that will start to matter within time (based on opinion, not fact yet,) but may give you a better sense of where the algorithm will change when it comes to optimizing video.
On our last post, we covered some great online video tips and making your online videos good for search engine optimization, driving traffic and boosting sales on your ecommerce website. Video is rapidly, if not already, one of the most effective ways to capture a visitor/customer. If you stay well behind this trend, your competitors can really get the edge on your business.
Videos, believe it or not, can work at the most basic level. Yes, making a professional video for your products, company, etc is nice, but again, a basic video can very well do the job as well.
Reading a piece on Entreprenuer.com titled, “Secrets of Crafting a Top-Notch Online Video,” some great gems are there in order to get your video up and going, and most of all, make them effective for your ecommerce business.
If you’re not using video in your online marketing strategy, you’re leaving a huge element of exposure and driving traffic back to your website out of the equation. I’m not so sure you can even say you have an online marketing strategy in 2012 if it does not include video. If you do have an internet marketing strategy and it DOES NOT include video…I think as you’re reading this right now you’ll start noting that you need to have one and it needs to be done as soon as possible.
Video has exploded onto the scene about 2 years ago or so. This is when websites, especially ecommerce websites, saw an incredible value and consumer engagement when video was posted on their websites, especially videos to showcase products, etc.
If you’re an internet retailer and still not thinking about online video or some strategy to start think about how you’ll get video on your website, you may be behind the curve. Don’t just think that because your top competitors don’t have video that you’re OK. If anything, that should be more of a motivating factor to get on the ball with online video. If you wait for your competitor to do things and then you follow, you’ll never be a leader in your niche.
It’s no secret that video can prove to be a winning strategy in ecommerce web design and marketing. Video in ecommerce seems very much to be trending up and more and more internet retailers understand how it can impact conversions, thus starting to implement video into their ecommerce websites.
